[Grovenet] Was: "economic cancer"?/now govt saving money

[Steven]

YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio -- Hanging next to city planner Bill D'Avignon's desk 
is a giant map of this city, divided into neighborhoods. One is Oak 
Hill, a gritty enclave just south of downtown. The neighborhood, once 
densely populated, has lost 60% of its population in recent decades and 
is dotted with abandoned buildings and empty lots.

Faced with the devastation of Oak Hill and other depressed pockets of 
the city, Youngstown is trying an unusual approach: Allow such areas to 
keep emptying out and, in some cases, become almost rural. Unused 
streets and alleys eventually could be torn up and planted over, the 
city says. Abandoned buildings could be razed, leading to the creation 
of larger home lots with plenty of green space, and new parks.

Youngstown, a former steel-producing hub, has been losing residents for 
years as a result of the closing of most of its steel mills. But rather 
than struggle to regain its former glory or population, it has adopted 
an economic-development plan that boils down to controlled shrinkage. By 
accepting the inevitable, the city says it can reduce its housing stock, 
infrastructure and services accordingly.

The plan is still in its early stages. As a first step, Mr. D'Avignon 
and other city planners have divided Youngstown into 127 neighborhoods, 
and labeled them as stable, transitional or weak. Now they're working on 
a customized plan for each one, noting which corners need street signs, 
which sidewalks need to be repaired and which buildings need to be 
demolished. The goal is to craft plans for about 30 neighborhoods a year.

Another goal is to wipe away the most obvious blight. The city estimates 
it will take about four years to bulldoze the biggest eyesores, 
including about 1,000 abandoned homes and several hundred old stores, 
schools and other structures.

"The vision is still evolving, but the ultimate result will be to create 
more open space where there used to be part of the city," says Mr. 
D'Avignon.

Talk like that would be considered blasphemy in most cities, where 
officials are taught to promote growth and development and fight against 
population decline. Accepting that a city is going to shrink goes 
against conventional wisdom that a bigger city means more jobs, more 
taxpayers, more revenue, better education, and better services -- in 
essence, a higher standard of living.

PODCAST

Youngstown Mayor Jay Williams explains the strategy behind the plan to 
scale down the town.

• City's Changing Face: Youngstown maps

"It's un-American. It seems like you're doing something wrong if you're 
not growing," says Hunter Morrison, director of the Center for Urban and 
Regional Studies at Youngstown State University, who worked with the 
city to come up with its strategy. But he says the idea is "not really 
about growth or shrinkage, it's about managing change."

Controversial Approach

The approach is controversial. Encouraging and accepting the hollowing 
out of neighborhoods will, by default and design, hit Youngstown's poor 
and minority residents the hardest. About 45% of Youngstown's residents 
are black, another 5% Hispanic, and the blight is heavily concentrated 
in minority neighborhoods, which are slated for the biggest makeovers.

"You always have to ask yourself: 'What areas are going to be 
abandoned?'" says John Russo, who teaches labor and working-class 
studies at Youngstown State. "And most of those are the African-American 
parts of the city."

Youngstown has promised not to force anyone to move, which has helped 
allay some fears in minority neighborhoods.

Others think the idea could be a hard sell. "You have to be skeptical, 
because it's really hard to do something like this," says Frank Popper, 
a Rutgers University land-use planner who studies regions with 
population declines. "The one thing you always run up against is that 
Americans don't want to be told about decline."

The Oak Hill neighborhood in Youngstown, Ohio

Youngstown, which has lost half its population since the 1950s, says it 
needs a radically different approach to halt decay. It's pointless to 
try to revive certain neighborhoods, the city's leaders argue, since the 
exodus of residents often makes those areas unpleasant and dangerous 
places to live, leading to further decline.

"The concept of trying to grow out of economic malaise is just not 
realistic for us," says Mayor Jay Williams, 35 years old. One of his 
first official acts after being elected in 2005 was to apply surplus 
money to demolition in the city.

Although Youngstown is one of the first cities to openly embrace this 
philosophy, the idea of planning to get smaller is gaining consideration 
around the world. Earlier this year, the University of California, 
Berkeley, held a symposium called "The Future of Shrinking Cities" that 
attracted 100 people from five continents.

In parts of eastern Germany, the government has earmarked some $3.4 
billion for tearing down communist-era prefabricated apartment blocks 
and replacing them with green space, partly in response to an exodus of 
residents to the West.

European cities are more experienced with the phenomenon of shrinking 
urban centers, having endured centuries of war and famine that caused 
many of the region's great cities to fluctuate in size over time.

A Berlin-based "Shrinking Cities" project, partly funded by the German 
government, compiles research about urban-population loss. The group 
says that during the 1990s more than a quarter of the world's large 
cities saw population declines, mostly in industrial regions such as 
eastern Germany and the U.S. heartland, but also in Japan, Russia, and 
China, where people are moving from remote cities to booming coastal 
centers.

"The issue is most visible in cities that are concentrated in a single 
industry, like steel," says Philipp Oswalt, an architect who heads the 
German project. Indeed, a similar pattern is now being repeated in a 
host of other Midwestern cities, including smaller ones such as Muncie, 
Ind., and Flint, Mich., which have seen huge shutdowns of auto-related 
plants and subsequent population declines.

Population loss can manifest itself in unexpected places and for a 
variety of reasons, says Mr. Oswalt. Paris, for instance, has a vibrant 
center, but is surrounded by rings of industrial suburbs where, in some 
cases, population is falling. New Orleans was radically downsized in a 
matter of hours by a hurricane and floods.

The German group has put together a traveling art exhibit on the topic, 
with works from more than 200 artists in 12 countries. One film profiles 
a suburban family moving the remains of a loved one from a city cemetery 
to a nearby township. A painting depicts a neighborhood scene where 
little remains but a utility pole surrounded by children's toys. The 
exhibit recently opened in Cleveland after a run in Detroit, two cities 
grappling with population declines.

Few cities have adopted a plan like Youngstown's. The city is a classic 
"hole in the donut" community -- increasingly empty in the middle, but 
with growing suburbs.

In 1950, Youngstown's population stood at 168,000. The steel industry 
was booming and city leaders envisioned Youngstown growing to a quarter 
of a million people by the end of the century. New neighborhoods were 
laid out on the fringes of the city in anticipation of growth.

A Tailspin

But by the 1980s, the steel industry had gone into a tailspin as 
producers faced an influx of lower-priced, foreign-made steel. Today, 
only a single large steel mill is left and the city's population has 
wilted to about 80,000. Most of the mills have been torn down.

Like other Midwest cities, Youngstown tried to find other big employers 
to replace steel. City officials lured both a state "supermax" prison 
and a for-profit prison. Other efforts, including redeveloping about 450 
acres of former steel-mill sites into industrial parks, have been 
successful, but not the job-creating dynamos that steel was.

A neighborhood on the north side of Youngstown, Ohio

Youngstown is bisected by the Mahoning River, a meandering waterway once 
lined with the mills. The city has made some headway in recent years, 
sprucing up downtown buildings, while Youngstown State -- located not 
far from downtown -- has invested in new buildings and landscaping. But 
population continued to decline and abandoned buildings blighted entire 
city blocks. Property- and income-tax revenue fell, and delinquencies rose.

In 1999, city officials decided they had to come up with a new master 
plan. The task was assigned to Mr. Williams, then a city planner and now 
mayor.

"We came up with a simple concept," he says. "This will be a smaller 
city, but that doesn't have to be a bad thing."

He doesn't mean physically smaller. Youngstown will never reduce its 
overall footprint, he says, because political boundaries are too deeply 
ingrained. Lopping off neighborhoods would likely prompt litigation from 
residents who don't want to lose city services. Meanwhile, neighboring 
suburbs aren't that interested in annexing Youngstown's problems.

'Clean and Green'

But within the city, which sprawls out over 35 square miles, there are 
sizable areas that can be shifted to other uses, Mr. Williams says. He 
envisions large blocks of green space throughout the city. The theme of 
the master plan is to make Youngstown "clean and green," he says.

The mayor has sharply increased the city's annual budget for demolition 
-- to $1.5 million this year from $320,000 in 2005. Youngstown is filled 
with properties that have been essentially abandoned by owners who 
failed to keep up tax payments. The city places liens on the properties 
it clears, to cover the cost of demolition, and recently shifted to a 
policy of trying to negotiate with owners to gain control over such 
parcels. These blurred ownership lines are one of the reasons the city 
expects it will take years to reshape many neighborhoods. "At this 
stage, we're focused on clearing decades of blight that had built up," 
says the mayor.

Tearing things down is relatively easy and is done by many cities. Much 
tougher is figuring out creative ways to use vacant land and getting 
residents to accept a new vision for what it means for their city to 
prosper.

With this in mind, Youngstown in late 2005 asked a group of urban 
planners to come up with design ideas, focusing on the Oak Hill 
neighborhood. Planners canvassed the neighborhood, asking residents what 
they would like to see. The answers surprised them.

Many city planners, for instance, favor creating dense developments. But 
many Oak Hill residents told them something very different.

"They said that the one thing they liked was that their area was 
becoming less dense -- that there was more space between them and their 
neighbors," says Terry Schwartz, an urban planner from Kent State. They 
weren't eager to see new housing built either, since many long-time 
residents fear new units are almost certain to be low-income housing.

Joseph Jennings, a 74-year-old retired steelworker, has lived in Oak 
Hill since he came to Youngstown in the 1950s from West Virginia to work 
in the mills. He says he likes the idea of reshaping his neighborhood so 
it's less crowded. "It'd help hold up the value of the property and make 
people more willing to invest," he says. "It's a good thing to spread 
things out -- that's the way people like to live nowadays anyway."

He built his house nearly 30 years ago, buying a double lot so he would 
have room for a two-car garage. He notes there are a number of empty 
lots on his street today.

Norma Stefanik, an urban designer who lives in one of Youngstown's most 
desirable neighborhoods, on the city's north side, says more attention 
should be paid to basics -- such as using existing building codes to 
pressure landowners to do a better job of maintaining their properties. 
"A lot could be done just by going after the people who are letting 
their properties decline," she says.

Rufus Hudson, an African-American councilman who represents Youngstown's 
largely minority east side, knows the areas slated for emptying out are 
mostly occupied by minorities. But he says the city can't continue to 
serve an infrastructure built for a much more densely populated city. 
"Our population has fallen steadily," he says, "but we still have 535 
miles of roads that have to be kept paved and plowed."

The forces of demographics are doing much of the clearing for the city. 
Mr. Hudson estimates that within a decade, about 10% of the residential 
streets in his district will be empty enough to allow them to be closed.

The city has told residents that it will stop investing resources to 
redevelop certain areas. City officials say there are many places where 
streets could ultimately be dug up, street lights taken down, and 
sidewalks removed in order to create green spaces where there were once 
densely settled blocks.

While it doesn't have specifics yet, the city says it expects certain 
vacant land to be turned into parks or community gardens. Another idea, 
already taking place to a limited extent, is to take empty parcels on 
blighted streets and sell them for small amounts to remaining residents 
-- so homeowners who have decided to stay would be allowed to expand 
their yards or even rebuild their houses to spread out over more than 
one lot.

The day-to-day task of planning for a smaller Youngstown is handled by 
Mr. D'Avignon, director of the city's Community Development Agency, who 
works out of an office in a converted post-office building downtown. "We 
have to break the downward cycle," he says, noting that many people in 
Youngstown's stable neighborhoods are hesitant to invest in their homes, 
because they worry that the blight will eventually engulf them. "There's 
a mindset in Youngstown that says, 'It's coming my way, the blight is 
moving this way.' We have to put a stop to that."